Over the years, I have not yet grown my number of Twitter Followers over 1,000. But I managed to get two reasonable bumps in number of followers. How? I used a guest post on a Twitter blog to go from 140 to 600, and this year, an Interview on a well read blog pushed me over 700.

Guest Blogging to Gain Followers

Too many blogpost and video’s have been written how well guest posting works to build your brand, get more followers or RSS readers or get more comments on your own blog. I will not expand on the existing materials from better experts than me. I will just link to some great resources out there at the bottom of this blog. No, what I would like to highlight here, are just my own experiences with guest blogging, and how it helped me to get more Twitter followers.

I wrote one guest post only at the end of 2009. I didn’t wrote my post for a blog focused on anything I usually write on. No, I wrote a guest post for a blog focused on Twitter. As Twitter was about to break into the mainstream media and for the bigger public, I wrote a post on Why Twitter will go mainstream in 2009.

The whole purpose of my guest post were three fold:

See if Darren Rowse would except my post. As I’m Dutch, English is not my first language. And as some commenter's pointed out my bad behavior of relying on spell check, I was happy the quality of the post was good enough for Darren to post it on Twitip.

As I only had a low number of people following me on Twitter, I was guessing the guest post would add a bunch of new folks to follow me.

Guest posts are not only nice to get yourself out there, usually you also get the chance to get a link to your own blog. As Darren had started Twitip not that long before, the blog was not fully established from an SEO perspective if you would compare it with his other sites. But I knew he would make it big. An old link from an authority site would help me in the future.

After the post was published, I logged in to my email account, and was stunned about what I saw:

The Interview Effect

Over Christmas last year, I did an email interview with Aaron Wall. He asked me if I would be interested to do this, to get my perspective on working on a large site like eBay. As I’m a long time reader of SEObook, I was honored I would be featured on SEObook.com.

I got a lot of nice comments from people about the content, and obviously I also was interested in the effects on the number of Twitter followers. Now using Twittercounter, I could see the number jump up right after the interview was published.

The good news from this jump is, most of the new followers are working in the same industry as myself. This creates new opportunities to ask or give feedback on certain tests I would like to conduct, or changes in the search landscape that I see.

These ladies have it going on, and Twitter is definitely not new for them. As I was checking out their blogs, Twitter and Foursquare updates, I made sure I had my Twitter handle in the last slide. I saw a small jump in the numbers as you can see from the graph above here.

Conclusion

There are a number of ways you can gain followers on Twitter. The key, however, is to keep them, and get value out of the conversations you have.

As promised, here are some resources I highly recommend on guest blogging: